Harry Clifton is the author of the poetry pamphlet Null Beauty (1976) and the books The Walls of Carthage (1977), Office of the Salt Merchant (1979), The Liberal Cage(1988), and The Desert Route: Selected Poems 1973–1988 (1992). Clifton’s On the Spine of Italy: A Year in the Abruzzi(1999) is a prose work based on a year he spent in the Abruzzi mountains of Italy with his wife, the writer Deirdre Madden. He is also the author of a collection of fiction, Berkeley’s Telephone and Other Fictions (2000).

Clifton has been an International Fellow at the University of Iowa and was poet-in-residence at the Frost Place in New Hampshire. He teaches at University College Dublin.